The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (2 page)

It was a woman's duty, Julia declared, to care for her kith and kin, to devote herself to the happiness of her husband and children, and give any time left to others. Women should never put themselves first. Julia was a powerful personality and she stamped herself and her views firmly on her daughters. Not until she was in her mid-forties, writing
To the Lighthouse,
did Virginia begin to loosen the ties with her mother.

*   *   *

Julia's mother, Maria (Mia) Jackson née Pattle, was born in India, the middle of seven sisters, all but one of them renowned for their beauty. Nervous and delicate, she grew up feeling closer to Sara, her next oldest sister, than to her mother. When that sister became engaged, Mia was thrown off balance and lunged headlong into marriage when barely 17 years old.

Her husband was a good-looking Calcutta physician, Dr John Jackson, 14 years her senior. Trained at Westminster Hospital Medical School, he joined the medical services of the Bengal Presidency. He was well regarded professionally, by not only Europeans but ‘Indian Ranees and Natives of the highest classes', and lectured at the Medical School of Calcutta.
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Mia was looking for a prop and perhaps he provided one at first, but before long he began to bore her; she thought him dull, his interests narrow. Like her sister, Mia's main interest lay in the arts, but Dr Jackson was lukewarm. His granddaughter Virginia looked on him in later life as ‘a commonplace, prosaic old man',
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but that was probably pure hearsay, picked up from her parents, for she was only five when he died.

Perhaps another reason for choosing John Jackson as husband was Mia's lifelong valetudinarianism. Nothing pleased her so much as discussing her ailments with a sympathetic, or helpless, listener. Her emotional needs, trivial or otherwise, were transplanted in to bodily discomfort: headaches, indigestion, rheumatic pains, abdominal complaints. Pain was Mia's chief means of communicating boredom, dissatisfactions, and disappointments. Dr Jackson either failed to recognise his wife's signals or, one suspects, turned a blind eye to them. At any rate, the Jacksons' relationship slowly deteriorated.

Mia Jackson produced two daughters and then, after a six-year interval, Julia was born in 1846. Mia at once made Julia the centre of her life to the virtual exclusion of her husband. It is more than likely that Julia's health and, no doubt, her own was the excuse for quitting India when Julia was two and returning to London. Leslie claimed that Julia believed she was her mother's least-loved daughter, although the evidence points to the fact that Mia worshipped Julia.

Dr Jackson stayed on in Calcutta for another seven years after his wife's departure. When he gave up his practice and returned to London, shortly before the Indian Mutiny, he was a stranger in every sense to the nine-year-old Julia. She felt no affection and seems to have been indifferent to his presence, much as her mother was. He set up in medical practice for a time but he had few or no outside interests, and no influence with any of his family. Leslie Stephen observed that ‘he did not seem to count as fathers generally count in their families'.
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Mia Jackson quickly found her feet in London with the help of her sister Sara and husband Thoby Prinsep. The Prinseps were living in an old converted farmhouse, Little Holland House, in what is now West Kensington. Holland House itself had been the centre of the Whig aristocracy at the beginning of the century and in the 1860s Little Holland House became an ‘Aristocracy of Intellect', the ‘Temple of the Arts'.
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Sara Prinsep – known as the ‘Principessa' – was the driving force, and the power of her personality, together with the deep interest and involvement she and her husband had in all the arts, attracted painters and writers, and even politicians of the time, to the Sunday afternoon gatherings. Cultural snobs the Prinseps may have been but their home provided a stimulating, Bohemian atmosphere for Mia Jackson and her daughters.

Tall, elegant and handsome, Mia attracted much attention. Thomas Woolner, the pre-Raphaelite sculptor, was loud in his praises for ‘the beautiful Mrs Jackson and her three beautiful daughters'. But it was on Julia, as she grew into adolescence, that the painters' eyes became fixed. Burne-Jones took her for his model in
The Annunciation.
G. F. Watts played with her. Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner each wanted to marry her. Aunt Sara and Uncle Thoby were proud of her. Her mother was delighted, for looks came a close second to illness in Mia Jackson's book.

Julia's beauty was remote, cold and, from the beginning, touched with melancholia. Men put her on a pedestal and admired her from a distance. Part of her reserve came from shyness and a sense of intellectual inferiority – although she spoke French well and knew enough Latin and History to instruct her children in those subjects – but some of it, perhaps, hid boredom. At a party or a picnic on the river she might be seen standing alone and unattended, her mind apparently elsewhere.

Yet Julia, particularly before her second marriage, possessed a warmth that would emerge when she was at ease and enjoying herself. Then her gaiety was infectious and could spread like fire through a room. Even in later life it would be felt by her children. It was Julia who created ‘that crowded merry world which spun so gaily in the centre' of Virginia's childhood and which for Virginia vanished on her death.
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Many people saw her as ‘stern and judgemental'. There was certainly no mistaking her disapproval: ‘If she had looked at me as I have seen her look at some people, I would sink into the earth,' Leslie Stephen told his children.
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Julia's interest in nursing and ‘good works' developed early through her experiences with her mother. Discussion of her mother's symptoms, and those of family and friends, occupied a good slice of the day and when Mia Jackson was particularly troubled Julia would rarely be long away from her side. Not that Mia's ills were entirely psychosomatic for, in her late thirties, when Julia was nine or ten, she developed the first attack of what sounds to have been rheumatoid arthritis. That lasted several months and Julia was closely concerned with looking after her. Although, characteristically, the disease remitted, there were further attacks and in old age she was badly crippled and restricted to spending most of her days in a chair.

Julia's satisfaction was to fetch and carry for her mother, pour out this or that of the numerous medicines – which included morphia and chloral – discuss her condition and make her comfortable. In her mother's eyes, Julia was perfect and indispensable.

Nursing came to be an important way for Julia to express her feelings and be valued. It was always difficult for Julia to show or admit to open affection; she seemed to be afraid of giving too much of herself away. She told her daughters, ‘Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anyone guess that you have a mind of your own.'
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Through nursing she was able to do good and be looked upon as angelic, all the while remaining detached and in control. She occupied the centre of her stage, and yet her real self remained hidden. She kept her thoughts to herself. Years later, she wrote revealingly that ‘the relations between the sick and the well are far easier and pleasanter than between the well and the well.'
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Mia Jackson occasionally worried that Julia, her ‘lamb', was too solemn and secretive for her own good. She had few friends in childhood and none with whom she was intimate. She was not close to either of her sisters, although she was fond of the eldest Adeline and, despite the ten-year gap between them, became the confidante of Adeline's unhappy marital experiences.

Her uncle Thoby Prinsep probably understood Julia better than anyone. She worshipped him and early on in life came to look on him as a father-figure. He was nearly 60 when Julia and her mother arrived in England. A dynamic, extroverted man, he had held high office in the East India Company until retirement some ten years before. Like his wife, he was very involved in the arts and literature and one of his hobbies was to translate Persian poetry. He seems to have taken a close interest in Julia and she responded with a ‘simple, uncritical, enthusiastic' hero-worship.
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Little Holland House was her home of education, where she learnt social ways and acquired many of her attitudes and interests. She spent much of her youth there and was, no doubt, spoilt and allowed to feel important. She became knowledgeable in the arts, learnt ‘to listen devoutly' to distinguished men: ‘to accept the fact that Watts was a great painter, Tennyson a great poet; and to dance with the Prince of Wales'.
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Julia became, in other words, a well educated and cultured upper-class young lady. Sometimes she accompanied the Prinseps on their tours abroad, usually, but not always, with her ailing mother. She was invariably extremely anxious at any separation, worrying about her mother's health and comfort and generally fearing the worst. Telegrams and letters of reassurance went backwards and forwards in a steady stream between mother and daughter whenever they were parted.

Separation anxiety can be catching and readily passed on to the next generation. Virginia was similarly affected and, from the age of seven or eight, was intensely anxious when separated for long from her mother and later mother-substitutes. When Julia was late home, even by a few minutes, Virginia would work herself up into a lather of anxiety.

It was during a visit to Venice with her mother and the Prinseps that Julia met Herbert Duckworth and immediately fell in love. Mia Jackson may not have been much surprised but she probably had very mixed feelings over the prospect of losing her lamb. But Uncle Thoby approved, despite Herbert being more hearty than aesthetically minded, and helped to persuade his sister-in-law to agree to the marriage. Julia was married soon after her twenty-first birthday in 1867.

Herbert Duckworth was 13 years older, a barrister with plentiful private means. His family were minor county gentry and, despite their money having come originally from commerce, he was clearly a good catch.

Julia was, she claimed, immensely happy in her marriage to Herbert. Although she never spoke of him to the Stephen children, Virginia came to believe, from what she learnt from her half-sister Stella, that Julia idealised Herbert, ‘the perfect man: heroic, handsome, magnanimous, “the great Achilles whom we knew”'.
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He was certainly different in every way from the intellectual Leslie Stephen, her second husband.

Marriage did not change her controlling nature and from the start she mothered Herbert and fussed over his health. She was fearful she might lose him and was on tenterhooks whenever he was away from home for long. Once, he missed his train home and, when he failed to arrive at the usual time, Julia panicked and nearly collapsed.

Her apprehension turned out to be justified when, after only four years together, Herbert suddenly died of a brain haemorrhage. Julia was inconsolable: a world of pure love and beauty had been taken away. Her anger and despair were immense, but she could not express her feelings. She refused to share her grief and her anger grew. Who could she direct it against other than herself? She could not rage directly against Herbert for leaving her, nor her mother hovering in the background. They were sacrosanct. Instead she made God the target of her anger. From henceforth, she declared, she was an atheist. She would no longer believe in a Christian God who permitted such suffering.

Through her action Julia not only released anger but hurt her mother deeply, for Mia Jackson was a devout Anglican who pleaded and prayed for her daughter to return to the Faith. Julia was stony-hearted. So far as she was concerned, God was dead. Perhaps for the first time in her life she refused to give in to her mother.

Whatever unsaid satisfaction Julia may have derived from this psychological twist, it did little to relieve her grief. Her anger persisted and melancholia became part of her nature, colouring her views of the world and life. For a while she wanted to die but she was now responsible for three children and, in any event, she lacked the self-destructive streak of her youngest daughter. She followed Samuel Johnson's advice and filled every waking moment with humanitarian activity: caring for the children, helping her mother and doing good works outside the home. She often exhausted herself and melancholy was never far away, but her visits to the sick and needy helped her to keep up appearances: ‘Cheerfulness is a habit to be acquired', she firmly declared. ‘no one venturing to attend the sick should wear a gloomy face.'
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So she passed the next nine years until she married Leslie Stephen in 1878.

Chapter Two

Leslie Stephen

Leslie was born in 1832, three years after his brother Fitzjames. He was considered by his parents from infancy to be delicate and highly strung. As a result he was over-protected and spoilt by his mother, who continued for many years to treat him as a sickly child. Leslie took full advantage of his position and came to expect his mother and devoted young sister to satisfy his every wish and need. They usually did and when they failed to come up to expectation a paroxysm of rage ensued. He adored his mother and confided his fears to her, but in the presence of his father Sir James Stephen, the great colonial administrator, he became a changed being, inhibited and shy, incapable of talking freely about himself or his feelings. He feared his father – for no specific reason – and found him unapproachable. In turn, his father complained how ‘very inarticulate and very reserved' his son was.
1

In 1847 Sir James became deeply depressed and had to retire from the civil service. He was never an easy man to manage and over the next year or two the patience of his wife must have been strained to the limit in looking after him. Significantly, Leslie collapsed in depression the following year and spent much of that summer in bed. At the time he was being tutored for Cambridge and living at home with virtually no friends. His brother was already at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, ‘successful and competent'. Although Leslie thought of himself as inadequate by comparison with Fitzjames, he was reasonably confident of getting into Trinity and was not unduly worried by the impending exams. It may be that Leslie's depression was, partially at least, an unconscious attempt to draw his mother's attention from her husband on to him. It was certainly a pattern that was to recur more than once during Leslie's marriage to Julia whenever he felt neglected.